


Night Train to Melbourne

by PromisesArePieCrust



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 19:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9399236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PromisesArePieCrust/pseuds/PromisesArePieCrust





	

Phryne and Jack leaned toward the corpse on the coroner’s table, a pale man in his late 30s. After a minute’s inspection, they looked up at each other. “Strangulation?” she guessed, and Jack hummed his agreement. She walked around the table to stand next to him, peering over his shoulder to look at his notes. 

“Seems rather cut and dried, Jack. He was found with the rope around his neck, suspended, right?” she read from the report, while Jack tried to articulate his unease with the information that had been collected.

“That was how he was found, and the coroner agrees it was how he died, but I visited the scene, and there are some things that don’t add up. The penmanship on the note, for instance. It looks rushed and emotional, but everything else seems meticulously planned and rational. His careful dress, his flat. Not a hair out of place on his head nor a dish out of place in the kitchen.”

“Well—” Phryne began.

“There’s something else." Jack shifted and cleared his throat. "One of his neighbours told me that…the deceased was involved with his soulmate. Romantically involved,” he clarified quietly. Phryne looked up at him, trying to look neutral.

‘It takes all kinds,’ she thought sympathetically, but she felt a little uneasy.

“What it common knowledge?” she asked.

“Several of his neighbours seemed to know. I haven’t spoken to his parents and extended family yet. They, as well as the soulmate, live up in Bendigo.” She walked back toward the table, to the head of the expired Phillip Mansfield. “It must be terribly awkward for them,” she said softly. She inspected his visage, wondering what clues to his personality lay in the lines of his face. Did Phillip smile much? Frown a lot? What would possess him to…? She snapped out of her reverie and looked at Jack. If Jack suspected there was more to this than suicide, she knew him well enough to listen.

“Have you spoken to the soulmate?”

“That’s where I was hoping for your assistance, Miss Fisher,” he said as he walked toward her. The closer he got, the more her skin tingled and the wider her unintended smile. He was ‘hoping for her assistance!’ she crowed loudly in her mind. Her inward moment of celebratory giddiness passed and she felt her gaze narrow and her other senses become more keen as she moved into investigative mode. 

Jack watched her eyes brighten and felt his heart beat wildly. Too wildly for someone recently divorced, he scolded himself, but newly divorced or not, he couldn’t help but respond to her vibrancy; the best he could do was keep on task. “The soulmate in Bendigo—” he began.

“Man or woman?”

“She’s a woman. I’ve been granted a couple of days to travel and investigate, but I don’t think it will give me enough time, given the travel time alone. The department doesn’t want me to spend too much energy on something so…well, you can imagine.” Phryne nodded, then smiled radiantly.

“Well then, Jack, what sort of travel companion are you?”

 

At hearing a familiar, confident stride clacking down the hallway, Dr. MacMillan looked up from her desk. “Well, Phryne, I’m desperate for a smoke break, so your timing is impeccable,” she grumbled, eagerly abandoning her notes and ushering her to a back door that led to a small grassy area with a bench. Phryne watched her light up and inhale gratefully.

“Those things will take your breath,” she said, though not really chiding.

“For the tiny moments of serenity they give me, I’ll let them have my breath,” she said through the smoke, “and I’ll leave the running to you,” she added. Phryne smiled.

“All right, Mac. I need your opinion on something. I’m taking a train to Bendigo tomorrow for a case—“

“Bendigo? You have a client who needs help in Bendigo?

“Not a client, no. Detective Inspector Robinson asked as a favour, and— stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything. Anyway, you could do worse,” she muttered behind her cigarette.

“I’m not…Mac.” She shot her a look before continuing. “It’s a sensitive case. It involves soulmates who appear to have been romantically involved. I know it happens on occasion of course, I’m hardly sheltered, but I know nothing of the…psychology involved in such a situation.”

Mac shook her head, thinking. “I can only speak to the biology of such a pairing, not the psychology. Of course, if there are any children from the union, they are prone to developmental and physical disabilities, sometimes madness. _Are_ there any children involved?”

“Not to my knowledge. I’m more wondering about the mental soundness of the soulmate herself.”

“Is she a suspect?”

“It’s unclear. The death looks like a suicide, but there are some inconsistent pieces and we need to speak with her.”

“I can’t offer you much except what you probably already feel. That making someone like a soulmate into the centrepiece of your life doesn’t lend itself to easy living, let alone the taboo against it in nearly every society, civilised or not. Piling sexual tension onto a soulmate dynamic is horribly unstable. Poor woman,” Mac breathed as she stomped out her cigarette.

 

The train ride to Bendigo was uneventful; Phryne took a train ahead of Jack to scout and find the address when he was delayed at the station, and, in the end, Jack didn’t even need the extra days that Miss Fisher had been there to offer: Allison Jenkins, Phillip Mansfield’s soulmate, crumbled and spilled everything within minutes of them arriving at her door. She’d only just arrived back in Bendigo herself, and her agitated air immediately tipped them off that something was amiss. She crumpled onto her sofa, weeping. “He wanted to end things with me. The move to Melbourne was part of that. But I couldn’t…I didn’t want…he wasn’t just my soulmate!” she wailed pitifully.

 

Phryne was happy to at least have a return trip to share with Jack, and an evening storm provided an eerie but exciting backdrop to their trip back to Melbourne. “Do you meet with your soulmate?” she asked, watching the lightning in the distance. He’d never spoken of his friends or family, and she felt it best not to pry, as he gave her the same courtesy; but the late hour, the rhythmic rocking of the train and the whiskey they sipped in the private car all lent themselves to stepping out of ordinary bounds.

“We have lunch or tea together sometimes. She’s getting on in years. I met her when I was a teenager and at that time she was celebrating the birth of her first grandchild.” Phryne smiled at him to continue. 

“Her correspondence during the war kept me sane. Rosie was, understandably, out of her mind with worry and it radiated from her letters. But Sylvia was always much more…philosophical. Humorous, even. She was a great comfort.”

Phryne remembered her own correspondence during that dark time and was quiet for several moments. “Was it hard for her to be without her soulmate for so much of her life?” she asked finally, not wanting to lose the thread of this intimate conversation.

“She said her youth was easy, that she lived in a much simpler time; that it’s now that she’s happy to have me.” He looked at the floor, musing over their last visit.

“I’m sure anyone hewn from the same soul as you is a delight, Jack Robinson,” Phryne said sincerely. He looked over at her and tried to temper the delight suffusing him at her mild flirtation.

“Do you meet with yours?” he asked, only just preventing himself from brushing some longer strands of hair that had worked themselves into her fringe away from her face.

“Oh yes. We met when we were both teenagers, just before I left for England. The separation was difficult, and felt unfair since we’d only just found each other, but we always stayed in touch. You said it perfectly—she also kept me sane. And when I returned to Melbourne,” she smiled, remembering their reunion at the dock, “it was as though I’d never left.”

“Doctor MacMillan,” Jack said with a sudden understanding. She nodded and flushed, pleased that he was so attuned to the full constitution of her soul. She held his eyes and smiled. She thought, hoped, he might lean in and kiss her, but he kept still and finally the movement of the train pushed them apart slightly. They finished their drinks, easing the tension that had filled their bodies, filled the whole cabin.

“Do you believe in a bodymate?” she finally asked.

“Someone who is the perfect reproductive and life-mate match?” Jack asked incredulously, amazed that Phryne would even consider such a question.

“It seems that’s what Allison believed of her soulmate,” Phryne shrugged. Jack thought for a moment.

“No, I don’t believe in a bodymate. I find it pretty unromantic, frankly, the idea that there is only one person, whom I may never find, that I could be happy with in this life.” He eyed her uncertainly, as though he might not actually know anything at all about Phryne Fisher. “Do you?”

She laughed.

“Well, truthfully, I’ve never thought about it much, but when you put it like that, it does sound horribly unromantic.”

As the night wore on, they donned some lap blankets and sat marginally closer together. Eventually, the small finger of her hand drifted to the small finger of his hand, and they did nothing but let that skin touch for several minutes, breathing and thinking, as the train pulled into the Melbourne station.


End file.
